Using days as scheduling granularity
 

I have a fairly long project I've been trying to set up, and day granularity is really about right for it. However, here are a few comments about using this mode with Omniplan.

The underlying granularity is much less than a day. Seconds? Minutes? Nanoseconds? This means that some things that make sense to people may not work in Omniplan. For example, in some cases I got an error when scheduling a one-day project because when I entered the same date for both start and finish, it complained that the finish date is required to be after the start date. However, what a person would do is to start the project at 8:00am on that day and end it at 5:00pm (or whatever the start/stop times are). That way, the underlying start time would be before the end time even though at the day-granularity level, they are both the same. In other words, when scheduling a start time, it should always be placed at the earliest possible underlying instant of the interval, while end times should always be placed at the latest possible underlying instant. Or at least that's what makes sense to me.

And that brings up another matter: if you're using day granularity and a work-day is defined as 8 hours, then your schedule had better consist of exactly 8-hour days, or else another bunch of unintuitive things will start happening. Why? Because the underlying day is 8 hours, so if you have a 6-hour schedule on Friday, then you'll still have 2 hours left of that “day” on Monday, and things will just get progressively weirder. In fact, I think it might be reasonable for the program to complain if anyone's schedule contains a workday that is not an integral multiple of the scheduling granularity, just for user sanity maintenance.

The last comment isn't really about granularity directly. It has to do with modifying a project “on the fly”. Once a project has begun, OmniPlan becomes very neurotic about ex-post-facto modifications. In my case, I had completed the earliest steps on one thread, but needed to modify some laters ones and rebalance the world. The earlier bits kept getting shifted around and I couldn't use the lock feature or any other method to place them where they actually were in the previous week. (I wanted them in the plan for completeness of the overall project.)

Thanks,
Greg Shenaut